The Ultimate Theory of Personality

Dr. C. George Boeree

La théorie ultime de la personnalité (en français: Anna Chekovsky)

After a semester of Personality theories -- Freud and Jung and Rogers and
Frankl and Bandura and Eysenck, etc., etc., etc. -- students often ask, once again,
isn’t there one theory we can trust and use with confidence?  Can’t we narrow
it down a bit?  Tell us, what is right and what is not!

Well, unfortunately, Personality is not yet a science, at least not in the sense
that Biology or Chemistry are sciences.  In those fields, although there is
disagreement about details and the latest findings, there is a common body of
knowledge that few people in the field argue about.  Not so, obviously, in
Personality.

However, there are slowly emerging ideas that seem to pop up again and again
in different theories, often with different names, but there none-the-less. 
Sometimes they occur in theories that are otherwise quite different, or that
come from a different perspective, such as clinical versus experimental versus
factor analysis versus phenomenological.  Perhaps the field will indeed become
a science, perhaps not too far in the future!

I know I’m excited!

So, I have taken the bull by the cojones, so to speak, and have compiled this
little list of things I see as being, if not universal, at least more likely features of
the future ultimate theory of personality.  Here goes...

Consciousness and the unconscious

This, of course, is one of Freud’s greatest contribution.  Even if he didn’t invent

the terms, he certainly was responsible for popularizing them!  Many theories
postulate some sort of unconscious, not necessarily as a place where our worst
fears bubble and boil, but as a way of accounting for the many things that
influence us without our full awareness.
We can pick out three aspects of the unconscious.

The first is biological.  We come into this life with something like
Freud's id or Jung's collective unconscious in place.  It is likely
composed of whatever instincts remain a part of our human nature,
plus our temperament or inborn personality, and perhaps the
preprogramming for stages of life. This biological unconscious
overlaps in part with the existentialist concept of thrownness.

As for possible instincts, I would nominate three

“complexes” of them:  A mating complex, an assertive
complex, and a nurturant (or social) complex.

Second, there is the social unconscious (as Fromm calls it), which
actually resembles Freud’s superego more than Freud's id.  It might
include our language, social taboos, cultural habits, and so on.  It
includes all the cultural things we were surrounded with in our
childhood and have learned so well that they have become "second
nature" to us!  The negative aspects of the social unconscious
overlaps with the existential idea of fallenness and with Rogers’
idea of conditions of worth.

And third, there is the personal unconscious (to borrow Jung’s

term), perhaps understood as the unconscious aspect of the ego.  It is
composed of our idiosyncratic habits, the more personal things we
have learned so well we no longer need to be conscious of them in
order to enact them -- like knowing how to drive so well that we can
comb our hair, talk on a cell phone, light a cigarette, and notice the
attractive person in the rear view mirror all at the same time (at
least until you run off the road into a tree).

Included among those well-learned things might be the

defense mechanisms.  With these we ignore, with
habitual efficiency, uncomfortable realities in order to
save our sense of self-worth.  More a little later....
But let's not get overly enthusiastic about the unconscious!  Few psychologists
today view it as the location of our true selves, the answer to all our problems,
or some deep psychic well that connects us with the universe or God!  It is
where the more-or-less automatic processes of instinct and the well-learned do
their thing.

All this is in contrast to (in fact defined in contrast to) consciousness or

awareness.  Other than instincts and perhaps a few associations learned by
classical conditioning, it seems that all things going into or out of our psyches
pass through awareness.

What consciousness is will be a question for a good while longer.  It’s not
terribly available to traditional research methods!  But for now, we can see it as
the ability to experience reality (outer and inner) together with its meaning or
relevance to ourselves (as biological, social, and even individual organisms). 
Or the ability to be open to the world while maintaining a degree of separation
in the form of an integrated self.  I would add that it may be consciousness that
also provides us with the freedom to choose among the choices available to us -
- i.e. self-determination (if not full-blown free will).

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind about

consciousness is that it is personal.  It is yours and yours alone.  And
 it is within this personal consciousness that all of your "psychology"
takes place.  Everything you feel, perceive, think, and do is
phenomenological, i.e. experience that is not just based on a reality
that stands outside of you, but on your subjective view of reality as
well, a view which may be significantly different from mine! 
Therefore, in order to understand people, we need to understand
them from the inside.  This little fact is what makes psychology so
much more difficult than the physical sciences!

Self-determination

Free will doesn't fit very well with science.  It seems to require "supernatural"
involvement in the natural world.  But we really don't have to be "above" the
natural world in order to have a degree of freedom within that world.

The baby begins life nearly as intimately connected with his or her world as in
the womb.  As we develop from babies into adults, we gradually separate
ourselves from the world.  Our interior causal processes - especially mental
processes - become increasingly independent of the causal processes outside of
us.  A gap develops that allows us to be influenced by outside situations, but not
necessarily determined by them.
This gap is like a large river:  The man on the opposite bank can wave and
jump and yell all he wants -- he cannot directly affect us.  But we can listen to
him or interpret his semaphore signals.  We can treat his antics as information
to add to all the information we have gathered over our lives, and use that
information to influence our decisions -- influence, but not cause.

By the end of life, some of us are nearly impervious to what others think about
us, can rise above nearly any threat or seductive promise, can ignore nearly
any kind of urge or pain.  We are still determined -  but little in our immediate
situation is more than information we utilize in making our decisions.  This
may not be free will in the absolute sense, but it is certainly self-determination.

As a middle-aged man, I have dozens of years of experiences -- my childhood,

my cultural inheritance, the books I've read, conversations with friends, my
own thoughts -- that have made me who I am today.  All this is on top of my
unique genetics and other physical realities of who I am.  The things that
happen to me now are  experienced through this mass of uniqueness, and my
responses depend, not only on my present situation, but on all that I am.

Stages

Stages are something most personality theorists shy away from.  Freud and
Erikson are the obvious exceptions, as is the developmentalist Piaget.  And yet
there is a very biological basis for the idea.  We can, on pure biology, separate
out at least three stages:  the fetus, the child, and the adult.  This is, in fact,
completely parallel to the egg, caterpillar, butterfly example we learned in high
school biology!

In addition, we can see three transitional stages:  infancy, adolescence, and

senescence.

Infancy is not, actually, found in more primitive animals, and is

greatly exaggerated in humans.  We are, in a sense, all born
prematurely.  Perhaps this was the result of an evolutionary
dilemma:  How can an upright creature give birth to a baby with a
large head without killing the mom?  That’s right:  Give birth before
it gets too big!
 What that does for us is more than just let us live long
enough to give birth again.  It lets the infant soak up
information much earlier, and in a different way.  It
would seem that for the first 6 to 12 months, our neural
development is as yet incomplete.  As we learn, we
actually create certain neural paths, rather than just
tightening synapses as we do later in life.  It’s as if we
were actually learning instincts!

Adolescence also qualifies, I believe, as a stage.  The transition from

child to adult involves rather massive hormonal changes
accompanied by a growth spurt like you hadn’t seen since you were
two!  It is hard for me to conceive of these changes not having some
effect on us psychologically.

Senescence is, strictly speaking, the last year or so of a full life,

during which time the organs begin to deteriorate and shut down. 
We don't usually see this as a stage, and in fact most people never
reach it  (accidents and diseases usually beat senescence to the
punch).  But socially speaking, in our culture we certainly prepare
ourselves for this inevitability, and that might constitute a social
stage, if not a biological one.

As this last point suggests, there are certainly cultural additions we can make. 
In our culture, there is a sharp transition from preschool child to school child,
and another sharp transition from single adult to married adult. For all the
power of biology, these social stages can be every bit as powerful.
To venture a guess as to the psychological side of these biological stages:  The
fetus focuses on biological development, which is transformed by the
presence of others in the infant into ego development in the child.  In turn, the
ego development of the child is transformed by the advent of sexuality in
adolescence into the “trans-ego” or social development of the adult.

Another way to look at it goes like this:  In the fetal and infancy stages, we lay
the groundwork and develop our temperaments (founded in hormones and
neurotransmitters).  In the child stage, we develop a personality (founded in
habits).   In adolescence, continuing into adulthood, we develop character
(based on conscious decision-making).

Temperament

Temperament is what we call that part of our personalities or characters that is

built-in to us genetically.  Consequentially, although there is always a degree of
flexibility allowed, to a large extent we "are" our temperaments for our whole
lives.  Temperament is very in right now, and justifiably so.  Jung led the way,
Eysenck made it more scientifically acceptable, and the Big Five made it official.

Nearly everyone I know of accepts two dimensions of personality as

established before birth, probably genetically:

emotional stability (AKA neuroticism...) and

extraversion-introversion (AKA sociability, surgency...).

Three more seem to have popular approval:

conscientiousness (AKA anality, judging-perceiving...)

agreeableness (AKA warmth, feeling-thinking...)
openness (AKA culture, intellect, intuiting-sensing...) - possibly an aspect
of intelligence

And there are three other contenders that are a little harder to place:

psychoticism (Eysenck) - perhaps a combination of dis-agreeableness and

non-conscientiousness
impulsivity (Buss and Plomin) - perhaps an aspect of non-
conscientiousness
activity (Buss and Plomin) - perhaps an aspect of extraversion

But we need to beware:  These results of factor analysis may be as much a

reflection of language as of true genetic foundations of personality.  As we
continue to develop our understanding of genetics and the precise
relationships of protein synthesis to brain function, we may find that there are
hundreds of "temperaments," or find instead that the concept doesn't hold up at
all.

Learning

With the exception of Skinner, Bandura, Kelly, and a few others, learning is
rather taken for granted by most personality theorists.  But I suspect it
shouldn’t be.  We can postulate at least three kinds of learning: basic, social,
and verbal.

Basic learning includes the behaviorist Pavlovian and Skinnerian

conditioning, of course -- getting feedback from your environment.
It also includes the latent learning that E. C. Tolman talked about: 
We learn about our environment just by being in it!

George Kelly’s way of looking at basic learning derives

from the work of Snygg and Combs, which in turn derives
from the Gestalt psychologists:  We learn to differentiate
one thing from another on the basis of the consequences. 
Either way, behaviorist or gestalt, this kind of learning
requires little in the way of consciousness.

There is also environmental learning that involves other people. 

When junior does something that mom or dad does not approve of --
he may be punished in some fashion.  Likewise, he may be
rewarded when he does something right for a change.  This is also
usually called conditioning, but the fact that it involves others means
it is also social learning, and so fraught with extra difficulties.

For example, if every time your run into a tree your head
hurts, you will stop running into the tree.  On the other
hand, if every time you say "shit!" your dad hits you
upside the head, you may stop... or you may avoid dad, say
shit under your breath, begin to hate your father and
authority in general, start beating up little kids after
school, and so on, until prison effectively stops the
behavior.  These kind of things seldom happen with trees.

Social learning includes vicarious learning (noticing and recalling

the kinds of environmental feedback and social conditioning other
 people get) and imitation (Bandura’s modeling).  This kind of
learning is probably the most significant for the development of
personality.  It can be either conscious, as when we are watching an
artist to learn their technique, or unconscious, as when we grow up
to be disconcertingly like our parents.

And there’s verbal learning -- learning not from the environment or

the behavior of others, but from words.  Culturally, this is, of course,
a highly significant form of learning.  Most of the learning we do in
our many many years of schooling is verbal.  And yet we don’t know
that much about it at all!

One thing is certain:  The old models of the rat with his conditioned and shaped
behavior, and of the computer with its programming, are not very good ones. 
If you really need a simple metaphor for human learning, you are better off
thinking of people - especially children - as sponges!

Emotions

Emotions or feelings have always been a key point of interest in personality

theories.  At the lowest level, we have pain and pleasure, which are really
more like sensations than feelings.  There is also psychological pain and
pleasure -- call them distress and delight -- which may be the root of all other
emotions.  Distress is what we feel when the events of the world are more than
we can handle.  Delight is what we feel when we discover that we can handle
them after all!

Anxiety is a favorite topic in personality theories.  Although many

definitions have been proposed for anxiety, they tend to revolve
around unnecessary or inappropriate fear.  Kelly notes that it is
actually the anticipation of a fearful situation, accurately or not. 
Fear, in turn, is usually understood as involving the perception of
imminent harm, physical or psychological.  These definitions serve
well for most circumstances.

Guilt is another key emotion.  Related to shame, it is usually

understood as the feelings aroused when one contravenes
internalized social rules.  Kelly provides a useful elaboration:  He
defines it as the feeling we get when we contravene our own self-
 definition (which may or may not involve those standard social
rules!).  Existentialists add another detail by suggesting that guilt is
closely related to the sense of regret about opportunities not taken.

Sadness is the experience of the world not being as it should be,

with the added notion that we have no power to alter the situation. 
Instead, there is a need to alter ourselves -- something we are
innately reluctant to do! Grief would be the obvious extreme
example, and depression could be defined as unrealistic sadness
that continues long after the original situation.

Anger is similar to sadness:  The world is not as it should be.  But

now, there's the added notion that we must energize ourselves to
change the situation.  When we act on our anger, it becomes
aggression.  Anger and aggression are not necessarily bad:  It is our
anger at social injustices, for example, and aggressive action to
correct them, that makes for positive social change!  Unrealistic
anger, the kind we hang on to despite the suffering it causes us and
the people around us, could be labelled hostility.

There are, of course, many other emotions and emotional shadings we could
try to define, but that's for another time and place.  Just one more thing should
be noted:  It appears that, where there is consciousness, there is emotion -- at
very least an emotional tone or mood.  As the existentialists point out, we just
cannot not care.

Motivation

Now here’s a more difficult one:  Motivation is central to most theories of

personality, and the variety seems unending!  But perhaps a little organization
will help.
First, there are the biological motivations, mostly instinctual
(although addictions are acquired).  There is our need for air, water,
food.  There is the need for pain-avoidance.  There is the need for
pleasure:  pleasant touch, comforting, sex.  We may want to add the
instinct complexes mentioned earlier:  mating, assertiveness,
nurturance.  All theories accept the idea of biological motivation,
although they differ wildly about their importance relative to each
other as well as to other kinds of motivation.

Second, there are the social motivations.  They may build on the
biological motivations, especially the instinct complexes, but they
vary enormously depending upon culture and even individual social
situations and learning.  Because they are learned so well and early,
we could borrow Maslow’s term and call them instinctoid.  Social
motivation may include our need for acceptance, attention, and
approval (Rogers’ positive regard), as well as those forms of self-
esteem that are based on such approval.  Shame and guilt are clearly
factors in social motivation, as is pride.

Parallel to the idea of a personal unconscious, we might also

postulate personal motivations.  These would be learned from our
unique and idiosyncratic experiences.

Last, but not least, there are higher motivations.  These are
conscious and we perceive them as providing our lives with
meaning. There appear to be two broad kinds:
 The first, self-enhancement.  Here we find those
motivations that lead us to extend ourselves beyond mere
survival and comfort, that lead us to be "all that we can
be."  It includes such motives as desire to learn more than
is needed, attain mastery beyond mere competence, and
creativity.  Adler might call it striving for superiority or
perfection.

The second, self-transcendence,  Most clearly defined by

Viktor Frankl, it is an outgrowth of our natural tendencies
to care about our children, families, friends, and lovers,
and our innate capacity for empathy.  It includes altruism,
love, compassion, and Adler’s social concern.  Perhaps it
also includes other experiences that take us out of
ourselves, such as music, art, literature, dance, and the
beauty of nature.

Erikson in particular talks about these two motives, especially in the

adult stages.  Whether they are simply derivatives of the lower needs
or are indeed something more, will remain a point of discussion for
many years into the future!

It seems to me that all of the preceding, and probably a few I’ve missed, qualify
as motivations.  Disagreements as to which are most significant are perhaps
misguided -- perhaps that differs from individual to individual!  And the
possibility that higher motivations derive from lower ones in no way
diminishes their significance.  Rollo May's idea of a large number of daimons,
unique to each individual, may be the best approach.

Balance

Another common theme in personality theories is the idea of balance.  Freud,

for example, felt that all of life's "crises" were best resolved at some midpoint
between two extremes -- Potty training was to be accomplished not too early,
not too late, not too harshly, not too leniently.  The result of a balanced
upbringing would be a balanced personality -- not too retentive, not too
expulsive, for example.
Even when talking about positive experiences, such as learning to act on our
imaginations, we need to recognize that those positive experiences need to be
tempered with at least a small amount of negative experiences.  For example,
without a little shame and self-doubt, Erikson tells us, acting on our
imaginations becomes ruthlessness.

Carl Jung's entire theory revolves around balance, especially between anima
and animus and between the ego and the shadow.  The former in particular
has received a great deal of attention and empirical support:  Androgenous
people (those who combine qualities of both the "feminine" and the
"masculine") appear to be mentally healthier.  The latter also has support: 
People who are able to think in "shades of gray" are much more mature than
those who see everything as black and white, good vs. evil, us vs. them.  Ego vs
shadow might also be understood as a need to balance rationality with
emotion.

The balancing act that has gotten the most attention from personality
psychologists is the balancing of our desires for individuality and
community.  This idea originated with Otto Rank's contrast between a desire
for both "life" (our drive towards individuality) and "death" (our drive towards
union with others), as well as the corresponding fears (isolation vs.
engulfment).  Rollo May uses the words will and love, others use words such as
autonomy and homonymy, agency and communion, egoism and altruism,
and so on.  Founded in our instincts for assertiveness and nurturance, in their
highest forms they are self-enhancement and self-transcendence, respectively.

Whatever the words, the balance to be achieved is between the impulse to

serve oneself (becoming all one can be as an individual) and the impulse to
serve others (become one with the universe of others).  But serve only yourself,
and you end up alone; serve only others, and you lose your identity.  Instead,
one must serve oneself in order to serve others well, and serve others in order
to best serve oneself.  At some point the two aren't so much balanced as
working synergistically.  Here's a nice quote from good old Einstein that sums it
up nicely:

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a
solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those
who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his
innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and
affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort
them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the
existence of these varied, frequently conflicting strivings accounts for the
special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the
extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can
contribute to the well-being of society.  (Einstein, "Why Socialism?" in
Monthly Review, NY, May 1949)

Neurosis

Life is filled with stress.  Many people's difficulties begin with childhood
experiences of abuse, neglect, poverty, sickness, parent's sicknesses or death,
parental psychological problems, divorce, immigration, accidents, deformities,
etc.  Sometimes, we are strong enough, or have enough support, to weather
these storms.  More often, we find that these experiences leave us with an on-
going apprehension about life.  We end up suffering from anxiety, guilt,
sadness, anger... not just as a direct result of the specific experience, but
because we no longer trust life.

A child with loving parents and compassionate relations, peers, and teachers
may well be able to cope with these problems.  On the other hand, a lack of
support, a lack of what Rogers calls positive regard, can leave even a child
blessed with a comfortable environment troubled with self-doubt and
insecurity.
Many of our theories were developed in order to help those who cannot cope,
and looking at Adler, Horney, Rogers, Bandura, and others, we find a great deal
of agreement as to the details.  As I said a moment ago, in order to cope with
life's difficulties, we need positive regard -- a little love, approval, respect,
attention....  But others often make that love and approval conditional upon
meeting certain standards, not all of which we can meet.  Over time, we learn
to judge ourselves by those standards.  It is this incongruence (Rogers’ term)
between what we need and what we allow ourselves that leaves us with low
self-esteem, or what others call a poor self-concept or an inferiority
complex.

There is a real advantage to the idea of inferiority over self-esteem:  It is

rare to have an overall sense of low self-esteem.  Instead, most people
have a sense of inferiority in some domains and not in others. 
Acknowledging the specificity of inferiority allows us to focus in on
possible remedies, while just saying someone suffers from low self-esteem
leaves us with little sense of where to start!

Confronted with the difficulties of life, lacking in the support of others, and not
even enjoying confidence in ourselves, we find we must defend ourselves
however we can.  We can list a large number of defense mechanisms, as Anna
Freud did, or we might be able to simplify a little, like Carl Rogers:  We defend
our sensitive egos by denial and rationalization.

Denial (perhaps including repression) is the attempt to block the

offending experiences directly, at the cost of emotional exhaustion.

Rationalization (including, perhaps, perceptual distortion) is a

more sophisticated and less exhausting way of dealing with the
offending information by working around it.

Either way, they are lies we tell ourselves and others in order to minimize the
impact of that incongruence between our need for love and security and what
is afforded to us.  We use these lies because they help, actually.  But they only
help in the short run:  Over time, they lead us into a possibly serious
misunderstanding of how the world (especially other people) works, and of
who, in fact, we are.

For those people who are, perhaps, a bit stronger than those who succumb to
neuroses, we still find suffering in the form of alienation:  There develops a
split between the deeper, "truer" core self within, and the persona (to borrow
Jung's term) that we present to the outside world to attempt to meet with those
conditions of worth that Rogers talks about.  We feel inauthentic, false,
phony, dishonest on the one hand, and misunderstood or unappreciated on the
other.  Over the long haul, this is likely to lead to depression and withdrawal
from social life.  But sometimes, alienation can lead to new perspectives on life
and some remarkably creative insights.  Perhaps we owe a good portion of our
art, music, and literature to these same people.

At the other end of the spectrum are those people whose psychological
suffering is founded on physiological problems.  Schizophrenia, although it
certainly has some sizable social and psychological causes, seems to have a
considerable physiological component.  Other disorders, such as bipolar, major
depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorders, improve with the use of
medications that enhance the effects of our own neurotransmitters.  The
borderline between psychology and physiology is becoming increasingly
blurry!

Coping strategies

People troubled by neuroses will be also find themselves attracted to certain

patterns of living that to one degree or another keep the psychological pain at
bay:  They may become alcoholics, or work-aholics, or sex addicts, or they may
become obsessed with cleanliness or physical health, etc.  These patterns can
involve unusual behaviors, emotional attachments, obsessive thoughts, etc. 
Binswanger calls these patterns themes and they are similar to Horney's
neurotic needs, Ellis's irrational beliefs, and the behaviorists' maladaptive
habits.
Many theorists see a certain order among these themes, and classify them into
four or five categories, which Horney calls coping strategies.  Fromm calls
them orientations, Freud uses character types....  They are, perhaps, the result
of an interaction between a person's temperament and the specific stressors
they must deal with.

There are two coping strategies we can readily agree on:

The dependent style is characterized by a sense of inferiority and

weakness, but also involves a strong -- perhaps desperate -- use of
manipulation of others.  It is also referred to as oral passive,
getting, leaning, compliant, or receptive.

The aggressive style is characterized by aggressive posturing that

serves to temporarily diminish a sense of inferiority -- i.e. the
superiority complex!  When you feel bad about yourself, beat or
humiliate someone else. This is also known as oral aggressive,
ruling, dominant, or exploitative.

From there, things get more uncertain.

A third candidate is the perfectionist style.  This type of person

attempts to actually reach the excessively difficult standards they
have accepted for themselves -- or at least pretend to reach them. 
They tend to be emotionally detached from others, and to dislike
depending on them. It is also known as the anal retentive or
hoarding type.

A fourth candidate is the schizoid style, AKA, the avoiding or

withdrawing type.  This kind of person attempts to remove him- or
herself from most if not all social interaction.  They tend to be
somber, psychologically detached, sometimes angry at the whole
world, and potentially violent.

And a last, fifth candidate is the infantile style, AKA, the phallic or
marketing style. These people avoid responsibility by essentially
extending their childhoods into adulthood.  They are obsessed with
youth, fun, adventure, and even high risk activities.  They tend to be
shallow and hedonistic.
One could argue that the most common coping strategy of all -- most common
because it works so well -- is conventionality, "busy-ness," getting lost in the
day-to-day.  It will be up to future personality researchers to determine which
of these are true styles, if the idea of a few styles holds up, or if we should stick
to a more individualistic way of describing people's coping.

Therapy

It is somewhat surprising that, for all the variation in theories, there is

considerable agreement regarding therapy.

First, there is an emphasis on self-awareness or, as Freud put it,

making the unconscious conscious. We encourage our clients to
understand their biological, social, and personal unconscious and
related motivations, to examine the conflicts between their needs
and the standards society and they themselves impose, and to look
behind their defensive posturings.

We are also taught to encourage our clients to discover more

conscious, higher motivations -- meaning the development of
competence, creativity, and compassion, becoming valuable to
oneself and to others....

And the means of therapy?  We are taught to use genuinely caring

dialog, and to provide support (not management or control) with a
goal of eventual autonomy for the client.

Now, each theory has its own set of preferred techniques.  Some, such as the
radical behaviorist approach, insist that techniques are all you need.  Others,
such as Rogers’ approach, suggest that you don’t need techniques at all, just an
empathic, respectful, and honest personal presence.  Probably the majority of
therapists, however, follow the middle path and use a few techniques that they
have found useful and that fit their clients’ and their own personalities.

In addition, we now have a fairly reliable set of drugs that appear to help.  Our
understanding of the physiological bases for psychological problems has been
growing rapidly, and, while that understanding is far from complete, it has
allowed us to help people more effectively.  Most therapists are still hesitant to
rely entirely on medications, perhaps rightly so.  But these medications
certainly seem to help in emergency situations and for those whose suffering
just doesn't respond to our talk therapies.

Conclusions

Even among our list of consistencies, we can find some "metaconsistencies." 

Being a visual sort, I like to put things into graphic form.  So here goes:

What you see here is "poor me" (or "poor you"), at the center of enormous
forces.  At top, we have history, society, and culture, which influence us
primarily through our learning as mediated by our families, peers, the media,
and so on.  At the bottom, we have evolution, genetics, and biology, which
influence us by means of our physiology (including neurotransmitters,
hormones, etc.)  Some of the specifics most relevant to psychology are instincts,
temperaments, and health.  As the nice, thick arrows indicate, these two mighty
forces influence us strongly and continuously, from conception to death, and
sometimes threaten to tear us apart.

There is, of course, nothing simple about these influences.  If you will
notice the thin arrows (a) and (b).  These illustrate some of the more
roundabout ways in which biology influences our learning, or
society influences our physiology.  The arrow labeled (a) might
 represent an aggressive temperament leading to a violent response
to certain media messages that leads to a misunderstanding of those
messages.  Or  (b) might represent being raised with a certain set of
nutritional habits that lead to a physiological deficiency  in later life. 
There are endless complexities.

I also put in a number of little arrows, marked (c).  These represent

accidental influences, physiological or experiential.  Not everything
that happens in our environment is part of some great historical or
evolutionary movement!  Sometimes, stuff just happens.  You can be
in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the right place at the right
time:  Hear some great speaker that changes the direction of your
life away from the traditional path, or have a cell hit by stray
radiation in just the wrong way.

Last, but not least, there's (d), which represents our own choices. 
Even if free will ultimately does not stand up to philosophical or
psychological analysis, we can at least talk about the idea of self-
determination, i.e. the idea that, beyond society and biology and
accident, sometimes my behavior and experience is caused by... me!

Perhaps there is more agreement than I originally thought!  This bodes well for
our field.  Perhaps we can get through the next so many years intact, and
arrive, somewhere in the twenty-first century, at full scientific status.  I do hope
so, although I also hope that Personality continues to be a bit of an art as well.  I
choose to believe that people will always be a bit harder to predict and control
than your average green goo in a test tube!

© Copyright 2000, 2006  C. George Boeree